Editorial: Allow a Sparks Street food-for-all

Art Is In Bakery stand at the Sparks Street Market. It is all the remains of a market where nine other vendors used to stretch along the pavement that is now empty in the background. The vendor behind the stand is Ty Simpson.Tom Spears / Ottawa Citizen

If the City That Fun Forgot were a country, Sparks Street would surely serve as the capital. It’s bad enough that the snoozer of a pedestrian mall is often devoid of life on evenings and weekends. Now, an eclectic mix of daytime food vendors has been chased from the space by a whirlwind of red tape.

To the Business Improvement Area behind the move we say: set the contraband cuisine, and the market, free.

The food fight surrounds a BIA edict banning vendors who had signed up to be part of the new Sparks Street Market — which operates on Thursdays and Fridays — from selling ready-to-eat food. The restriction wiped out most menu items on offer and, as a result, nine of the original 10 vendors packed up and left. The new-look market, if the BIA can find replacement businesses, will sell locally grown fruit, vegetables and flowers.

All this, because some established restaurants along the strip complained the hot food vendors were biting into their profits.

The knee-jerk reaction assumes the restaurants are right: that a majority of the people who frequented the quick-service stalls would have otherwise considered a sit-down establishment. It also assumes office workers are willing to dedicate their lunch hours to vegetable shopping, hauling bags of lettuce back to their cubicles.

We find those assumptions hard to digest.

There are many factors preventing Sparks from becoming the next ByWard Market or Elgin Street, but a couple stand out. The first is a relative dearth of people living in the area, a problem solved by focusing business efforts on the weekday lunch crowd and the weekend tourist/family crowd. The second is a lack of imagination, a problem solved by asking: what do those people want and/or need when they’re here? Weekday lunches are more about fuel than fine dining, and the ever-quickening pace of life is as credible a reason for a drop in sit-down restaurant traffic as the addition of a handful of street vendors.

Would it not make more sense to run a ByWard-style market on the weekend, drawing in locals and taking advantage of the Parliament Hill tourist traffic? For those who park for free at the World Exchange Plaza, it would be a nice alternative to trekking through Major’s Hill Park and past the U.S. Embassy. It might even draw more customers the Sparks Street restaurants when they actually have time to sit down and enjoy a meal.

As for weekdays, give the people what they want: a quick bite during a brief escape.

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